The endorsement on this appeal shows that Hinchlow sent the money. No
doubt Field was selected to write it as the person most necessary to
Hinchlow, who could much more easily get along without a new play than
without a popular actor. It is plain from the document itself that the
signers of it were all under arrest, probably for some tavern bill, or
it would not otherwise be easy to account for their being involved in
a common calamity. Davison was doubtless released as being the least
valuable. It is amusing to see how Hinchlow’s humanity and Christianity
are briefly appealed to first as a matter of courtesy, and how the real
arguments are addressed to his self-interest as more likely to prevail.
Massinger’s words are of some value as showing that he had probably for
some time been connected with the stage.
There are two other allusions to Massinger in the registers of Sir
Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels. Both are to plays of his now lost.
Of one of them even the name has not survived. On the 11th of January,
1631, Sir Henry refused to license this nameless performance “because
it did contain dangerous matter--as the deposing of Sebastian King of
Portugal by Philip II., there being peace sworn between England and
Spain.” He adds, amusingly enough, “I had my fee notwithstanding, which
belongs to me for reading it over, and ought always to be brought with
a book.” Again, in 1638, at the time of the dispute between Charles I.
and his subjects about ship-money, Sir Henry quotes from a manuscript
play of Massinger submitted to him for censure the following passage:--
“Monies? We’ll raise supplies which way we please,
And force you to subscribe to blanks in which
We’ll mulct you as we shall think fit. The Cæsars
In Rome were wise, acknowledging no laws
But what their swords did ratify, the wives
And daughters of the senators bowing to
Their wills as deities,” etc.
Sir Henry then adds, “This is a piece taken out of Philip Massinger’s
play called ‘The King and the Subject,’ and entered here forever to be
remembered by my son and those that cast their eyes upon it, in honor
of King Charles, my master, who, reading the play over at Newmarket,
set his mark upon the place with his own hand and in these words:
‘This is too insolent, and to be changed.’ Note that the poet makes it
the speech of Don Pedro, King of Spain, and spoken to his subjects.”
Coleridge rather hastily calls Massinger a democrat. But I find no
evidence of it in his plays. He certainly was no advocate of the
slavish doctrine of passive obedience, or of what Pope calls the right
divine of kings to govern wrong, as Beaumont and Fletcher often were,
but he could not have been a democrat without being an anachronism,
and that no man can be.
The license of the stage at that time went much farther than this; nay,
it was as great as it ever was at Athens. From a letter of the Privy
Council to certain justices of the peace of the County of Middlesex
in 1601, we learn that “certain players who use to recite their plays
at the Curtain in Moorfields do represent upon the stage in their
interludes the persons of some gentlemen of good desert and quality,
that are yet alive, under obscure manner, but yet in such sort as all
the hearers may take notice both of the matter and the persons that
are meant thereby.” And again it appears that in 1605 the Corporation
of the City of London memorialized the Privy Council, informing them
that “Kemp Armyn and other players at the Black Friars have again
not forborne to bring upon their stage one or more of the Worshipful
Company of Aldermen, to their great scandal and the lessening of their
authority,” and praying that “order may be taken to remedy the abuse,
either by putting down or removing the said Theatre.” Aristophanes
brought Socrates and Euripides upon the stage,--but neither of these
was an Alderman.
Massinger committed no offences of this kind, unless Sir Giles
Overreach be meant for some special usurer whom he wished to make
hateful, of which there is no evidence. He does indeed express his own
opinions, his likes and dislikes, very freely. Nor were these such as
he need be ashamed to avow. It may be inferred, on the strength of
some of the sentiments put by him into the mouths of his characters,
that he would have sympathized rather with Hampden and Pym than
with Charles I. But nothing more than this can be conjectured as to
his probable politics. He disliked cruel creditors, grinders of the
poor, enclosers of commons, and forestallers, as they were called;
for corners in wheat and other commodities were not unknown to our
ancestors, nor did they think better of the men that made them than we.
There is a curious passage in his play of “The Guardian” which shows
that his way of thinking on some points was not unlike Mr. Ruskin’s.
Severino, who has been outlawed, draws up a code of laws for the
banditti of whom he has become captain, defining who might be properly
plundered and who not. Among those belonging to the former class he
places the
“Builders of iron-mills that grub up forests
With timber trees for shipping;”
and in the latter, scholars, soldiers, rack-rented farmers, needy
market folks, sweaty laborers, carriers, and women. All that we can
fairly say is that he was a man of large and humane sympathies.
But though Massinger did not, so far as we know, indulge in as great
licenses of scenic satire as some of his contemporaries, there is in
his “Roman Actor” so spirited a defence of the freedom of the stage and
of its usefulness as a guardian and reformer of morals that I will
quote it:--
“_Aretinus._ Are you on the stage,
You talk so boldly?
_Paris._ The whole world being one,
This place is not exempted; and I am
So confident in the justice of our cause
That I could wish Cæsar, in whose great name
All kings are comprehended, sat as judge
To hear our plea, and then determine of us.
If, to express a man sold to his lusts,
Wasting the treasure of his time and fortunes
In wanton dalliance, and to what sad end
A wretch that’s so given over does arrive at;
Deterring careless youth, by his example,
From such licentious courses; laying open
The snares of bawds, and the consuming arts
Of prodigal strumpets, can deserve reproof,
Why are not all your golden principles,
Writ down by grave philosophers to instruct us
To choose fair virtue for our guide, not pleasure,
Condemned unto the fire?
_Sura._ There’s spirit in this.
_Paris._ Or if desire of honor was the base
On which the building of the Roman Empire
Was raised up to this height; if, to inflame
The noble youth with an ambitious heat
T’ endure the frosts of danger, nay, of death,
To be thought worthy the triumphal wreath
By glorious undertakings, may deserve
Reward or favor from the commonwealth,
Actors may put in for as large a share
As all the sects of the philosophers.
They with cold precepts (perhaps seldom read)
Deliver what an honorable thing
The active virtue is; but does that fire
The blood, or swell the veins with emulation
To be both good and great, equal to that
Which is presented on our theatres?
Let a good actor, in a lofty scene,
Shew great Alcides honour’d in the sweat
Of his twelve labours; or a bold Camillus
Forbidding Rome to be redeem’d with gold
From the insulting Gauls; or Scipio,
After his victories, imposing tribute
On conquer’d Carthage; if done to the life,
As if they saw their dangers, and their glories,
And did partake with them in their rewards,
All that have any spark of Roman in them,
The slothful arts laid by, contend to be
Like those they see presented.
_Rusticus._ He has put
The consuls to their whisper.
_Paris._ But ’t is urged
That we corrupt youth, and traduce superiors.
When do we bring a vice upon the stage
That does go off unpunish’d? Do we teach,
By the success of wicked undertakings,
Others to tread in their forbidden steps?
We shew no arts of Lydian panderism,
Corinthian poisons, Persian flatteries,
But mulcted so in the conclusion, that
Even those spectators that were so inclined,
Go home changed men. And, for traducing such
That are above us, publishing to the world
Their secret crimes, we are as innocent
As such as are born dumb. When we present
An heir that does conspire against the life
Of his dear parent, numbering every hour
He lives as tedious to him, if there be
Among the auditors one whose conscience tells him
He is of the same mould,--WE CANNOT HELP IT.
Or, bringing on the stage a loose adulteress,
That does maintain the riotous expense
Of him that feeds her greedy lust, yet suffers
The lawful pledges of a former bed
To starve the while for hunger; if a matron,
However great in fortune, birth, or titles,
Guilty of such a foul, unnatural sin,
Cry out, ’T is writ for me,--WE CANNOT HELP IT.
Or, when a covetous man’s express’d, whose wealth
Arithmetic cannot number, and whose lordships
A falcon in one day cannot fly over,
Yet he so sordid in his mind, so griping,
As not to afford himself the necessaries
To maintain life; if a patrician
(Though honour’d with a consulship) find himself
Touch’d to the quick in this,--WE CANNOT HELP IT.
Or, when we show a judge that is corrupt,
And will give up his sentence as he favours
The person, not the cause, saving the guilty,
If of his faction, and as oft condemning
The innocent, out of particular spleen;
If any in this reverend assembly,
Nay, even yourself, my lord, that are the image
Of absent Cæsar, feel something in your bosom
That puts you in remembrance of things past,
Or things intended,--’T IS NOT IN US TO HELP IT.
I have said, my lord: and now, as you find cause,
Or censure us, or free us with applause.”
We know nothing else of Massinger’s personal history beyond what has
been told, except that the parish register of St. Saviour’s contains
this entry: “March 20, 1639–40, buried Philip Massinger, a stranger.”
A pathos has been felt by some in the words “a stranger,” as if they
implied poverty and desertion. But they merely meant that Massinger did
not belong to that parish. John Aubrey is spoken of in the same way in
the register of St. Mary Magdalen at Oxford, and for the same reason.
Massinger wrote thirty-seven plays, of which only eighteen have come
down to us. The name of one of these non-extant plays, “The Noble
Choice,” gives a keen pang to a lover of the poet, for it seems to
indicate a subject peculiarly fitted to bring out his best qualities
as a dramatist. Four of the lost plays were used to kindle fires by
that servant of Mr. Warburton who made such tragic havoc in our earlier
dramatic literature, a vulgar Omar without the pious motive of the
Commander of the Faithful, if, as is very doubtful, he did indeed order
the burning of the Alexandrian Library.
To me Massinger is one of the most interesting as well as one of the
most delightful of the old dramatists, not so much for his passion
or power, though at times he reaches both, as for the love he shows
for those things that are lovely and of good report in human nature,
for his sympathy with what is generous and high-minded and honorable,
and for his equable flow of a good every-day kind of poetry with few
rapids or cataracts, but singularly soothing and companionable. The
Latin adjective for gentleman, _generosus_, fits him aptly. His plots
are generally excellent; his versification masterly, with skilful
breaks and pauses, capable of every needful variety of emotion; and his
dialogue easy, natural, and sprightly, subsiding in the proper places
to a refreshing conversational tone. This graceful art was one seldom
learned by any of those who may be fairly put in comparison with him.
Even when it has put on the sock, their blank verse cannot forget the
stride and strut it had caught of the cothurnus. Massinger never mouths
or rants, because he seems never to have written merely to fill up an
empty space. He is therefore never bombastic, for bombast gets its
metaphorical name from its original physical use as padding. Indeed,
there are very few empty spaces in his works. His plays are interesting
alike from their story and the way it is told. I doubt if there are
so many salient short passages, striking images, or pregnant sayings
to be found in his works as may be found in those of very inferior
men. But we feel always that we are in the company of a serious and
thoughtful man, if not in that of a great thinker. Great thinkers,
indeed, are seldom so entertaining as he. If he does not tax the mind
of his reader, nor call out all its forces with profound problems of
psychology, he is infinitely suggestive of not unprofitable reflection,
and of agreeable nor altogether purposeless meditation. His is “a world
whose course is equable,” where “calm pleasures abide,” if no “majestic
pains.” I never could understand Lamb’s putting Middleton and Rowley
above him, unless, perhaps, because he was less at home on the humbler
levels of humanity, less genial than they, or, at least, than Rowley.
But there were no proper æsthetic grounds of comparison, if I am right
in thinking, as I do, that he differed from them in kind, and that his
kind was the higher.
In quoting from Wordsworth’s “Laodamia” just now, I stopped short of
the word “pure,” and said only that Massinger’s world was “equable.” I
did this because in some of his lower characters there is a coarseness,
nay, a foulness, of thought and sometimes of phrase for which I find
it hard to account. There is nothing in it that could possibly corrupt
the imagination, for it is altogether repulsive. In this case, as in
Chapman’s, I should say that it indicated more ignorance of what is
debasingly called Life than knowledge of it. With all this he gives
frequent evidence of a higher conception of love than was then common.
The region in which his mind seems most naturally to dwell is one of
honor, courage, devotion, and ethereal sentiment.
I cannot help asking myself, did such a world ever exist? Perhaps not;
yet one is inclined to say that it is such a world as might exist, and,
if possible, ought to exist. It is a world of noble purpose not always
inadequately fulfilled; a world whose terms are easily accepted by the
intellect as well as by the imagination. By this I mean that there is
nothing violently improbable in it. Some men, and, I believe, more
women, live habitually in such a world when they commune with their
own minds. It is a world which we visit in thought as we go abroad to
renew and invigorate the ideal part of us. The canopy of its heaven
is wide enough to stretch over Boston also. I heard, the other day,
the story of a Boston merchant which convinces me of it. The late Mr.
Samuel Appleton was anxious about a ship of his which was overdue, and
was not insured. Every day added to his anxiety, till at last he began
to be more troubled about that than about his ship. “Is it possible,”
he said to himself, “that I am getting to love money for itself, and
not for its noble uses?” He added together the value of the ship and
the estimated profit on her cargo, found it to be $40,000, and at
once devoted that amount to charities in which he was interested.
This kind of thing _may_ happen, and sometimes _does_ happen, in the
actual world; it _always_ happens in the world where Massinger lays his
scene. That is the difference, and it is by reason of this difference
that I like to be there. I move more freely and breathe more inspiring
air among those encouraging possibilities. As I just said, we find
no difficulty in reconciling ourselves with its conditions. We find
no difficulty even where there is an absolute disengagement from all
responsibility to the matter-of-fact, as in the “Arabian Nights,” which
I read through again a few years ago with as much pleasure as when a
boy, perhaps with more. For it appears to me that it is the business of
all imaginative literature to offer us a sanctuary from the world of
the newspapers, in which we have to live, whether we will or no. As in
looking at a picture we must place ourselves at the proper distance to
harmonize all its particulars into an effective whole, I am not sure
that life is not seen in a truer perspective when it is seen in the
fairer prospect of an ideal remoteness. Perhaps we must always go a
little way back in order to get into the land of romance, as Scott and
Hawthorne did. And yet it is within us too. An unskilful story-teller
always raises our suspicion by putting a foot-note to any improbable
occurrence, to say “This is a fact,” and the so-called realist raises
doubts in my mind when he assures me that he, and he alone, gives me
the facts of life. Too often all I can say is, if these are the facts,
I don’t want them. The police reports give me more than I care for
every day. But are they the facts? I had much rather believe them to be
the accidental and transitory phenomena of our existence here. The real
and abiding facts are those that are recognized as such by the soul
when it is in that upper chamber of our being which is farthest removed
from the senses, and commerces with its truer self. I very much prefer
“King Lear” to Balzac’s bourgeois version of it in “Le Père Goriot,”
as I do the _naïveté_ of Miranda to that of Voltaire’s Ingénu, and,
when I look about me in the Fortunate Islands of the poet, would fain
exclaim with her:
“O! wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world,
That has such people in ’t!”
Those old poets had a very lordly contempt for probability when
improbability would serve their purpose better. But Massinger taxes our
credulity less than most of them, for his improbabilities are never
moral; that is, are never impossibilities. I do not recall any of those
sudden conversions in his works from baseness to loftiness of mind, and
from vice to virtue, which trip up all our expectations so startlingly
in many an old play. As to what may be called material improbabilities,
we should remember that two hundred and fifty years ago many things
were possible, with great advantage to complication of plot, which are
no longer so. The hand of an absolute prince could give a very sudden
impulse to the wheel of Fortune, whether to lift a minion from the dust
or hurl him back again; men might be taken by Barbary corsairs and sold
for slaves, or turn Turks, as occasion required. The world was fuller
of chances and changes than now, and the boundaries of the possible,
if not of the probable, far wider. Massinger was discreet in the use
of these privileges, and does not abuse them, as his contemporaries
and predecessors so often do. His is a possible world, though it be in
some ways the best of all possible worlds. He puts no strain upon our
imaginations.
As a poet he is inferior to many others, and this follows inevitably
from the admission we feel bound to make that good sense and good
feeling are his leading qualities--yet ready to forget their sobriety
in the exhilaration of romantic feeling. When Nature makes a poet, she
seems willing to sacrifice all other considerations. Yet this very
good sense of Massinger’s has made him excellent as a dramatist. His
“New Way to pay Old Debts” is a very effective play, though in the
reading far less interesting and pleasing than most of the others.
Yet there are power and passion in it, even if the power be somewhat
melodramatic, and the passion of an ignoble type. In one respect he
was truly a poet--his conceptions of character were ideal; but his
diction, though full of dignity and never commonplace, lacks the charm
of the inspired and inspiring word, the relief of the picturesque
image that comes so naturally to the help of Fletcher. Where he is
most fanciful, indeed, the influence of Fletcher is only too apparent
both in his thought and diction. I should praise him chiefly for the
atmosphere of magnanimity which invests his finer scenes, and which it
is wholesome to breathe. In Massinger’s plays people behave generously,
as if that were the natural thing to do, and give us a comfortable
feeling that the world is not so bad a place, after all, and that
perhaps Schopenhauer was right in enduring for seventy-two years a life
that wasn’t worth living. He impresses one as a manly kind of person,
and the amount of man in a poet, though it may not add to his purely
poetical quality, adds much, I think, to our pleasure in reading his
works.
* * * * *
I have left myself little space in which to speak of Ford, but it will
suffice. In reading him again after a long interval, with elements of
wider comparison, and provided with more trustworthy tests, I find that
the greater part of what I once took on trust as precious is really
paste and pinchbeck. His plays seem to me now to be chiefly remarkable
for that filigree-work of sentiment which we call sentimentality. The
word “alchemy” once had a double meaning. It was used to signify both
the process by which lead could be transmuted into gold, and the alloy
of baser metal by which gold could be adulterated without losing so
much of its specious semblance as to be readily detected. The ring
of the true metal can be partially imitated, and for a while its
glow, but the counterfeit grows duller as the genuine grows brighter
with wear. The greater poets have found out the ennobling secret, the
lesser ones the trick of falsification. Ford seems to me to have been
a master in it. He abounds especially in mock pathos. I remember when
he thoroughly imposed on me. A youth, unacquainted with grief and its
incommunicable reserve, sees nothing unnatural or indecent in those
expansive sorrows precious only because they can be confided to the
first comer, and finds a pleasing titillation in the fresh-water tears
with which they cool his eyelids. But having once come to know the
jealous secretiveness of real sorrow, we resent these conspiracies to
waylay our sympathy,--conspiracies of the opera plotted at the top
of the lungs. It is joy that is wont to over-flow, but grief shrinks
back to its sources. I suspect the anguish that confides its loss to
the town-crier. Even in that single play of Ford’s which comes nearest
to the true pathetic, “The Broken Heart,” there is too much apparent
artifice, and Charles Lamb’s comment on its closing scene is worth more
than all Ford ever wrote. But a critic must look at it _minus_ Charles
Lamb. We may read as much of ourselves into a great poet as we will; we
shall never cancel our debt to him. In the interests of true literature
we should not honor fraudulent drafts upon our imagination.
Ford has an air of saying something without ever saying it that is
peculiarly distressing to a man who values his time. His diction is
hackneyed and commonplace, and has seldom the charm of unexpected
felicity, so much a matter of course with the elder poets. Especially
does his want of imagination show itself in his metaphors. The strong
direct thrust of phrase which we cannot parry, sometimes because of
very artlessness, is never his.
Compare, for example, this passage with one of similar content from
Shakespeare:--
“Keep in,
Bright angel, that severer breath to cool
The heat of cruelty which sways the temple
Of your too stony breast; you cannot urge
One reason to rebuke my trembling plea
Which I have not, with many nights’ expense,
Examined; but, oh Madam, still I find
No physic strong to cure a tortured mind
But freedom from the torture it sustains.”